Public Education is Worth Fighting For

Public Education is about to venture back into the debate of charters and vouchers as options for turning around our struggling schools. With the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, Public Education is again being threatened by another "transformation" that is meant to raise standards and provide for excellence in American classrooms. However, with a focus on repealing the Common Core State Standards, providing vouchers and funding charter schools, there is little hope that this refurbished approach to transforming American education will do much more than frustrate high quality educators and leaders who have invested their lives into educating future generations of American children.

As a leader of a struggling school that is a completely different place than it was three years ago, I have a few pieces of advice for the incoming Education Secretary - not that I think they will be heard, but I have decided that if I do not use my voice to advocate for what I believe in (aka Public Education), then I am not being true to myself as a leader and I am not showing my community what I believe in and am willing to invest my time and effort into.

Common Core - Why does the Education Secretary want to repeal the Common Core? Her tweet, "Many of you are asking about Common Core. To clarify, I am not a support - period," (read more here) has been retweeted and quoted throughout the news cycles. The Common Core State Standards has put the need for more rigorous, student-centered educational practices that build on conceptual understanding the center of classroom planning and practice. How is that hurting anyone? The whole idea behind transforming our education system is that American students lag significantly behind students from around the world (see chart below) and in a global economy, we simply cannot afford for American innovation and business to continue to lag behind. 

While the roll-out of Common Core and the connection to APPR were highly (and rightly) criticized, the need for rigorous discourse, high quality instruction that builds on conceptual understanding, reading complex text, and writing across the content areas continue to be the best parts of Common Core and should not be "watered down" in the name of "transformation." The Common Core is not the problem in America's schools - if our students cannot meet the standards, we must look at effective leadership practices and effective classroom practices that will make sure that our students (that's ALL students) get the high quality instruction that they deserve. 

Vouchers and Charters - I can hear it now..."What's the big deal? If there is more choice, that will force schools to be better if they want to keep students!"Here is the real deal...it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to turn around a school. I am on year three and we are really starting to see gains across all areas. However, we have not yet reached a tipping point where the majority of our students are performing at or above their grade level. Public school dollars support charter and voucher programs that allow for students to leave public schools and attend a school of choice, which has a devastating impact on the resources available to students and in classrooms. Public schools have an obligation to provide the highest quality education to all of our students in order to have an educated citizenry and that requires having adequate resources. We cannot educate the future of our communities and our country if only some students are given the opportunity to experience excellence. 

Teacher Preparation Programs - In the past twenty-five years that I have been in education, there has been very little public debate about the quality and expectations of Teacher Preparation Programs. There is a significant amount of debate from within education, but no one else has really seemed to take on the challenge. I would encourage Betsy DeVos to take this on as one of her important first challenges - more important than Common Core revision, ESSA, or even the Voucher debate. Without having top notch teachers in our classrooms, very little matters about what the laws and regulations state about what we need in American classrooms. What we need, more than absolutely anything, is the best teachers ever. That will definitely require that colleges make changes to their programs. It will require that teacher preparation programs look much more like doctor preparation programs. And it should require changes to the salary scales for teachers as well - if we are expected to train like doctors, we should be compensated like doctors. After all, we are saving lives, too. 

So, my challenge to incoming Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is more of an invitation. Come and visit. See first hand who American children are, what American children are learning, and American teachers are teaching. Talk with high quality school leaders who are training the teachers who are coming out of our Teacher Preparation programs over the course of three years or more in order to make young teachers who have just stepped into the classroom into effective practitioners. And lastly, I would ask you to remember that educators are making investments in our future each and every day. We wouldn't ask Wall Street Investors to make a promising future without the appropriate resources - likewise, our public schools need the resources to ensure a bright future for ALL of our children. 

Developing Leadership Opportunities

One of the key components of leadership is developing the next generation of leaders, whether that is classroom leaders, model classrooms, or school or district level leaders. We have an obligation to ensure that the leaders who come after us have a mindset and beliefs that will serve the students of tomorrow and provide them with the absolute best education. In some ways, that means that leaders are always developing teachers out of the classrooms in their own building, which can have a significant impact on the instructional program in a school. So, it is necessary to have a leadership development plan.

Developing a leadership development plan starts with your own leadership as the school building leader. You must have an idea of where you need to learn and grow if you are going to model and create opportunities for leadership development in your school. As a leader, you must learn and grow alongside your staff - simply providing them with opportunities to learn is not enough, and expecting them to learn for you is poor leadership. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Deborah Rowland cites that many employees do not trust their boss and that most in-house leadership development is less about "doing leadership" and more about "how to do" leadership. As school leaders, we must start with ourselves if we want to develop highly effective leaders.

Having a leadership plan requires a common language around the competencies of leadership. There are certainly many to choose from - I have used the Turnaround Leadership Competencies by Public Impact for myself, my leadership teams, and my classroom leaders. Hearing my teacher leaders talk about recognizing the early wins or requiring all staff to make changes is exciting and it underscores the importance of having that common language throughout an organization in order to make substantive change. Here is an example of a self-assessment tool that leaders can use when beginning to make a leadership development plan.

The next levels of leadership vary based on the size of your system. Identifying these levels of leadership is essential for any strong leadership development plan. In my system, I have a leadership team (their primary role is leadership within the building), teacher leaders (they have additional leadership responsibilities that they have taken on outside of their classroom role), team leaders (they are the key person on their grade level team or department), and classroom leaders. There is some crossover between the layers of leadership, as some people are involved in multiple levels of the work.

My responsibility as the building leader is to distribute the leadership of our school vision through internal leadership and also provide opportunities for them to learn and grow their own skill set. Within this system, I have several leaders who aspire to be building leaders, several who wish to become model classrooms or instructional coaches, and some who are working on developing stronger communication skills within their grade level team. Differentiating leadership development and opportunities for growth requires that school leaders know the skill sets and leadership capacities of their staff as well as creative opportunities for leadership to live in your school. Leadership development also requires clear visioning, strong communication regarding the vision, and regular feedback and check-ins. Two-way communication and checking-in on progress have to be a priority in order for budding leadership to grow and yield the expected results.